[Text reads: Warning. This episode contains material that may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised. Srsly.]

[The Brain Scoop intro plays]

Emily: It's Valentines Day, and I don't have a valentine. 

Michael: Hola, mi amor. Uno cito de balducha. 

Emily: Let's gut it!

Okay, you guys, so um for this one, I'm going to be making the initial incision, um, right here on his chest. That's between the clavicle. We're going to be going down. Kinda like how we did the wolf, we'll be following the line of his sternum, and um, probably cutting down here to around the pubis.

Alright, first incision. Right here. This is ... pretty good. Let me grab my tweezers. He cuts open fairly well, I wasn't anticipating this.

Oh, we got some viscera. Right here. Let's keep going. Some of this, get some of this material out of here. Not entirely sure what the compound is. Seems inorganic. And, um, it looks like right here we have, um, the heart. 

I'm going to be cutting along his clavicle just to open him up a little bit better, so I can get better access to this, uh, muscle. Oh, God, that's gorgeous! That is beautiful. Think I can just, if I just clear around a little bit, this way. If I kept cutting down, and, um, here we go! We have the heart.

The heart, as we know, is commonly associated with feelings of love, and this goes back to ancient times, when philosophers, and uh, early physicians believed that the heart was the source of all love. Not necessarily the brain, as we know it now. The heart itself is a muscle, it's an incredibly dense muscle. It's, uh, hollow, as you can see.

Um, tt's the heart of a bison, not actually the heart of a teddy bear. I feel like I should be quite honest with you in that regard. So we got it from a butchers shop and they cleaved the top of the heart from it in order to get rid of the valves and the aorta. People will eat hearts, people still eat hearts, and they use them to make dog food, so that's why this was at a butchers shop. 

In any case, the heart is comprised of four different parts. It has the top two, the left and the right atrium, and then to bottom two, the left and right ventricles. The right side is the blood that is going to the lungs in order to become re-oxygenated. The blood from the left side goes through the aorta to every other part of your body. And you can see on this heart how much larger the left side is than the right side. So, it's going to get pumped out through the aorta and go to every other part of your body and come back through on the right side, become re-oxygenated, then eventually end up again on the left side where it is expended, comes in the repository, becomes re-oxygenated, and the cycle continues throughout your circulatory system. 

The size of a vertabrate's heart is going to be somewhat relative to the size of the animal itself. And not only that, there are a lot of other different factors involved. Whether or not it's a cold-blooded or warm-blooded animal, how much it moves, is it dormant.

A hummingbird has to have an incredibly rapid heart-rate in order to fuel all the blood that they require to their wings and for them to beat so quickly. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the blue whale's heart is roughly the size of a compact car, and will only beat around 2-7 times a minute. It has to pump 7 tons of blood through out it's entire body. A human's heart will beat anywhere between 70 and 90 times a minute, depending on how healthy you are, how much exercise you get, and other physiological differences between humans. That's 103,000 times a day, 36 million times a year, 2.5 billion times throughout your life if you live to the age of 65.

But the moral of the story is, be good to your heart, and don't you dare break mine. 

[The Brain Scoop outro music plays]

It still has brains on it.